25 May, 2017

Trump slaughters welfare state, drives US back to the 19th century

As The Real News reported, the
White House has unveiled a budget proposal that slashes the safety
net for tens of millions of people. It's called A New Foundation for
American Greatness. Its main targets are programs for low-income
Americans including well over $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and
welfare and tens of billions for disability benefits and student
loans. Meanwhile, the budget proposes what it calls the biggest ever
tax cut and a 10% increase in military spending.

This is the
most kind of horrific, classic right-wing, Republican, conservative
notion of what their hero would do. And Mr. Trump is trying to become
their hero, and doing a pretty good job it seems to me.

This budget
should put to rest any notion, that Mr. Trump is something different,
something beyond the conventional right-wing, left-wing split of the
Republicans and Democrats. This is good, old 'cut the taxes for the
rich and take it out in everybody's back'. It goes against what he
promised, but even more than that: this is going to make the gap
between the rich and the poor worse, it's going to make supports for
the middle class even weaker than they've been before.

It's sort of
the sign of the society rushing headlong into the self-destruction of
a gap between rich and poor that is not sustainable in most
countries, and certainly not in one that used to pride itself on
giving everybody a chance, giving everybody a leg-up, putting
everyone in the middle class. This is the end of all of that, even if
Trump doesn't get it all.

The overall
thrust is, unmistakably, we are going backwards historically, into
the 19th century.

The very
programs Trump is cutting, are programs that in many different ways
put money into this economy, help public services. And we are going
to see the effects, even if it's not bad as this budget proposal
wants it. Those effects are going to be felt by everyone, and above
all, by the middle and lower income people who don't need another
blow in the face, who will not get the benefits of the tax-cuts, but
will face a massive downsizing of what it is they've come to count
on.

I follow
closely the statements of large bankers, of large hedge funds
operators. They like Trump, they are happy with Trump. They see the
tax-cuts he's pushing, they see the deregulation he's pushing. He is
delivering to that part of the Republican party what he promised
them. And he is deciding to do that in classic fashion, by kind of
reneging the promises he made to the average people.

The rich
would have voted for Mr. Trump so that they can be richer at the end
of his presidency, than they were, going in. That seems to be as far
as those folks can see and we're going to live with the consequences
of that mentality.

On Capitol
Hill, Senator Bernie Sanders denounced Trump's proposal:

This is
a budget which will make it harder for our children to get a decent
education, harder for working families to get the healthcare they
desperately need, harder for families to put food on the table,
harder to protect our environment, and harder for the elderly to live
out their retirement years in dignity. This is a budget that is
immoral, and that will cause an enormous amount of pain for the most
vulnerable people in our nation.

Dean Baker
of the Center for Economic and Policy Research also spoke to The
Real News about the huge cuts that Trump
administration is about to bring for what has remained from the US
welfare state:

My guess is
it's probably bigger than the cuts the Ronald Reagan had for
low-income programs. It's important to keep in mind, not all this is
targeting low income. He does disproportionately hit low-income, but
the better or worse, there's not that much money that we give to
low-income people now. So a lot of the cuts here aren't really
directed at low-income people. I'm not trivializing the impact on
low-income people, it is bad.

Roughly a
quarter of Medicaid spending is for seniors, many of whom aren't low
income or at least weren't low-income during their working lifetime.
Many of these are seniors that are in nursing home facilities, and
they spent through their assets, and they now qualify for Medicaid.
So that's a very, very big hit.

Also in
here, there is huge cuts to the domestic discretionary portion of the
budget. This is most of what we think of as the Federal Government:
the National Parks, the National Endowment for the Arts, humanities,
NIH, the National Institutes of Health. He's projecting cuts over the
course of a decade of about 50% for those programs. That's an
enormous cutback on the size of those programs.

Also, very
big hits for federal employees. He's proposing large cuts to their
pay, to their retirement benefits, and I'll have to double-check
this, but I believe he's even proposing to cut pensions for people
who are already retired. This is money that they worked for, and he's
going to take it away from them.

Unfortunately,
it happens exactly
as described by the blog,
right after Trump's election: “Trump purely
represents the ruthless and direct cynicism of the elites: Yes, we
are the one percent who have exploited you and impoverished you, and
we want to govern so that to make sure that you will never rise up.
Neoliberalism officially passes the torch to a ruthless, modern
Feudalism ...”

The
'anti-establishment Trump' joke is over for good and the American
people will pay for it.